Get Well Soon: Planetary Health and Cultural Practices

David Cross Reader in Art and Design,Chelsea College of Arts,University of the Arts London

2Get Well Soon: Planetary Health and Cultural Practices

The Covid-19 pandemic and the climate emergency are both symptoms of the global social-ecological crisis. This crisis is an existential threat which demands concerted action based on shared understanding. At the same time, it is also the ultimate “wicked problem” – a dynamic situation of competing interpretations, conflictinginterests, and unconscious impulses. This paper proposes that art, design and the humanities – as spaces for creativity and criticality – can help address this crisis by engaging with the concept of “planetary health” and developing its implications in relation to the discourse of decolonisation.

3Get Well Soon: Planetary Health and Cultural Practices

Introduction From public to planetary health: a manifesto, was published in 2014 by Richard Horton and colleagues at The Lancet medical journal (figure 1).The manifesto celebrates the interdependence between human andecological systems: “Our vision is for a planet that nourishes andsustains the diversity of life with which we coexist and on which wedepend” (Horton et al., 2014, p.847). Described as “an attitude towardslife and a philosophy for living”, planetary health encompasses physicaland mental health. Aiming “to minimise differences in health accordingto wealth, education, gender, and place”, the manifesto has a clearethos of social justice. Here, I propose that the arts and humanitiescould contribute to planetary health, by complementing rational modesof understanding with creative imagination and critical reflection, andby engaging people through affective and embodied experience withthe ethical and emotional complexity of ecological regeneration andrestorative justice.

↓ Figure 1. Excerpt from Planetary Healthinfographic, 2017 © The Lancet

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Health as a Systemic Concept The first principle of the constitution of the World Health Organizationdeclares that, “Health is a state of complete physical, mental and socialwell-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity” (WorldHealth Organization, 1946, p.1). Acknowledging this ideal, Fritjof Capradrew on work by Gregory Bateson to propose a systemic conceptionof health:

Living systems are organized in such a way that they form

multileveled structures, each level consisting of subsystems which

are wholes in regard to their parts, and parts with respect to the

larger wholes. Thus, molecules combine to form organelles, which

in turn combine to form cells. The cells form tissues and organs,

which themselves form larger systems, like the digestive system

or the nervous system. These, finally, combine to form the living

woman or man; and the ‘stratified order’ does not end there.

People form families, tribes, societies, nations. All these entities—

from molecules to human beings, and on to social systems—can

be regarded as wholes in the sense of being integrated structures,

and also as parts of larger wholes at higher levels of complexity.

(Capra, 1982, p.80)

In 1972 Bateson had brought together insights from systems theory,psychology and anthropology to identify three interconnected networksexisting at the scales of the human being, the society and the ecosystem(Bateson, 1972, p.435 – 6). Rather than study these networks as discreteentities, Bateson focussed on how nonlinear causality and dynamicfeedback loops characterize the “infinite regress of relationships”between them (Bateson, 1972, p.246). Bateson’s work informedpsychiatrist and philosopher Félix Guattari, who observed, “More thanever today, nature has become inseparable from culture; and if we are tounderstand the interactions between ecosystems, the mechanosphere,and the social and individual universes of reference, we have to learn to think ‘transversally’” (Guattari, 1989, p.135).

5Get Well Soon: Planetary Health and Cultural Practices

Thinking Transversally To apply transversal thinking to the Covid-19 pandemic, let’s firstconsider the ecosystem. Johan Rockström of the StockholmResilience Centre identified nine planetary boundaries (figure 2),each delineating a critical threshold in the Earth system (Rockströmet al., 2009, p.472 – 475).

↑ Figure 2. Planetary boundaries diagram, 2015© J. Lokrantz, based on Steffen et al., Stockholm Resilience Centre.

6Get Well Soon: Planetary Health and Cultural Practices

Four of these boundaries have already been breached: the biogeo-chemical cycles of nitrogen and phosphorus, climate breakdown, lossof biosphere integrity, and land-system change. Scientific consensusis that the destruction of biosphere integrity and land system changeenabled the Covid-19 virus to emerge in late 2019. This should not havebeen a surprise: in 2000, researchers observed that, “The combinedeffects of environmentally detrimental changes in local land use andalterations in global climate disrupt the natural ecosystem and canincrease the risk of transmission of parasitic diseases to the humanpopulation” (Patz et al., 2000, p.1395 – 1405). In 2016, the UN warnedof the growing risk of “zoonotic” pandemics (UNEP, 2016, p.18).

Secondly, regarding the “mechanosphere”, clearing tropical forestsfor purposes including timber extraction, livestock rearing, and palmoil production brings people into contact with wild animals carryingpathogens that transmit to humans (Afelt et al., 2018; Randolph et al.,2020). The Forests & Finance coalition has shown that tropical forestdestruction is driven by a small number of multinational corporationsand the banks that finance them (2020). Banking and finance are keyto the neocolonial system of material extraction, which extendsinequalities established under colonial domination.

→ Figure 3. Sheep at a saleyard. Still from thedocumentary Dominion, written and directedby Chris Delforce, 2018 © Chris Delforce

Thirdly, the “universes of reference” which are the focus of this essay,should be addressed. As the Covid-19 pandemic spread to Europe,the English-language mainstream media ignored corporately financedtropical deforestation, and zoonotic disease transmission in factoryfarms, industrial slaughter-houses, and meat processing facilities (Pabstand Wallace, 2020).

Similarly, the fact that a privileged minority travelling by plane spreadthe virus around the world went unremarked. Instead, media coverageperpetuated a racialised fear of contamination, by focusing on “wetmarkets”, in which wild animals are slaughtered and sold for food andtraditional medicine. This framing reflected the privileged worldview ofinvestors and consumers in “developed” societies. Sociologist FouadMakki has shown how the discourse of development was mobilised bycolonialist nations attempting to retain power, as the old justificationscollapsed after the Second World War, writing:

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The mastery over nature, which was the essence of the Western

scientific ethos, became the new key to the mastery of empire.

Because science and technology were viewed as neutral, they

could be advanced with confidence, quite unlike the ethnocentric

ideologies of cultural chauvinism or racial superiority. Based on

Enlightenment ideals of progress, they offered a seemingly more

plausible basis for assertions of imperial hegemony and opened the

door to subsequent theories of modernisation. (Makki, 2004, p.155)

Today, as modernisation is transgressing ecological limits, the narrativeis shifting again, from mastery over nature to management of ecologicalrisk. A year before the Covid-19 pandemic, at its annual meeting inDavos, Switzerland, the World Economic Forum (WEF) acknowledgedthat deadly disease outbreaks are integral to the globalised industrial-consumer society: “with increasing trade, travel, population density,human displacement, migration and deforestation, as well as climatechange, a new era of the risk of epidemics has begun” (WEF, 2019, p.6).

Compounding the Injustices of Class and RaceAs long as people can profit with impunity from ecological damage,economic activity will transgress planetary boundaries. Like parasitesdraining vital nutrients from their hosts, colonial and neocolonial systemsexpropriate value while externalising risks onto the host country andthe global commons. While the WEF troubles over the risk of zoonoticdisease threatening mineral extraction in Africa (Sands et al., 2019),the ecological and health impacts of climate damage and fossil fuel useintersect with the injustices of class and race. For example, people ofcolour produce less air pollution than white people, but are moreexposed to it (François, 2019); white people produce more air pollution,but breathe less of it (Tessum et al., 2019). The Covid-19 virus can betransmitted on particles of air pollution (Wu, Nethery et al., 2020),compounding the suffering of people in communities already dispro-portionately suffering from poor respiratory health (Lerner, 2010).Discussing this pandemic in the USA, academic and activist Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has declared:

There are times, typically in the midst of a crisis, when the true

character of our society reveals itself, and the brutality of our social

hierarchy is laid bare. If [Hurricane] Katrina exposed the racism and

inequality of the American South and the Gulf Coast in particular,

the Coronavirus crisis shows that these overlapping issues of race,

class, inequality and oppression are not regional afflictions, but are

endemic to American society. (Taylor, 2020)

8Get Well Soon: Planetary Health and Cultural Practices

The afflictions of racism and inequality are not confined to the USA,or to the descendants of the African Diaspora. Across the world,indigenous communities are intensely vulnerable to illness and disease,overcrowding and a lack of access to clean water and healthcare.Director of the Institute of Race Relations, Liz Fekete observes:

In Brazil, Indigenous Peoples, who suffer disproportionately from

respiratory infections, are having to dig deeper into the Amazon

rainforest to avoid the pandemic. In Australia, Aboriginal people

and Torres Strait Islanders, who have high levels of diabetes and

renal failure, are at greater risk of severe attack from Covid-19

than other groups. In the US the health issues faced by American

Indians, accompanied by the lack of specialist health facilities

in reservation areas, also places them, too, at higher risk of

Covid-19 death. (Fekete, 2020)

↑ Figure 4. Nahua people infected with smallpoxdisease in the Americas. From the Florentine Codex (1540 – 1585), Book XII folio 54. InBernardino de Sahagún (1499 – 1590), compiler.Original illustration by unknown 16th-century artist/ Public domain.

↑ Figure 5. A Winter Scene with Skaters near a Castle by Hendrick Avercamp (1608). NationalGallery London / Public domain.

This pattern of contemporary injustice overlays the unresolved historicaltrauma of colonialism. Following the invasion of Latin America byColumbus in 1492, European colonisers violently subjugated andenslaved the indigenous peoples and stole their wealth. But thecolonisers also carried diseases (figure 4). As Alexander Koch, RobertDull and fellow researchers have shown, the resulting epidemicskilled up to 95% of the indigenous people - so many died that theircivilization collapsed and the land they had cultivated for centuriesreverted to forest, altering the climatic history of the planet, andtriggering “The Little Ice Age” in Europe (Koch et al., 2019, Dull et al.,2010) (figure 5).

9Get Well Soon: Planetary Health and Cultural Practices

Relating the historical origins and material impacts of the social-ecological crisis to their ideological dimensions, Gene Ray has proposedthat: “In the Sixth Mass Extinction, it is no longer permissible to thinkgenocide apart from ecocide; in the endgame of modernity, theseprocesses are knotted and unfold from the same supremacist logicsand fantasies” (Ray, 2017).

Achille Mbembe characterises the ideology of white supremacismas something akin to a sociopathic form of cognitive dissonance:

↑ Figure 6. Walter Crane, Imperial Federation: MapShowing the Extent of the British Empire in 1886.Colour lithograph. Published by Maclure & Co.,London as a supplement to The Graphic, 24 July1886 / Public domain.

The birth of the racial subject – and therefore of blackness –

is linked to the history of capitalism. Capitalism emerged as a

double impulse toward, on the one hand, the unlimited violation

of all forms of prohibition and, on the other, the abolition of any

distinction between ends and means. (Mbembe, 2017, p.179)

10Get Well Soon: Planetary Health and Cultural Practices

Liberating Creativity and Criticality

↑ Figure 7. Planetary Health and the Arts andHumanities, 2020 © David Cross

As this double impulse activates feedback loops of social breakdownand ecological extinction, the supremacist fantasy of omnipotence,and its corresponding pathology of powerlessness, engender mentaldisorders from anxiety and depression to psychosis, afflicting boththe oppressed, and the oppressors. As James Baldwin observes,

“It is so simple a fact and one that is so hard, apparently, to grasp:‘Whoever debases others is debasing himself’” (Baldwin, 1963). Unlikethe deliberate brutality of colonial rule, the injustices of neocolonialismmay be unwittingly perpetrated through negligence, ignorance andmisrecognition. Within the mechanistic paradigm of cause and effect,the dualistic separation of nature from culture, and a system of lawthat favours private interests over the public and commons, harm

to people and the planet is routinely excused as theunfortunate consequence of legitimate business. Forthe people who have suffered trauma, injury, and illnessas a result of what Rob Nixon calls the “slow violence”(2013) of ecological destruction, such excusescompound physical harm with the psychologicalburden of injustice. Meanwhile, for privileged peoplebenefitting from this status quo, feelings of anxiety,guilt, and anger are repressed by an orthodoxy ofpositivity that dissolves criticality and suspendsjudgement. Such psychological defences can havea paradoxical effect — psychoanalyst Sally Weintrobeexamines how climate denial can attack the rational mind in a destructive feedback loop:

Disavowal can lead us further and further away from accepting the realityof climate change, with murderous and suicidal consequences. Thisis because the more reality is systematically avoided through makingit insignificant or through distortion, the more anxiety builds up uncon-sciously, and the greater is the need to defend with further disavowal.(Weintrobe, 2013, p.7)

As Baldwin warns, “To defend oneself against a fear is simply to ensurethat one will, one day, be conquered by it; fears must be faced” (Baldwin,1962). Confronted with the explosive injustices and existential threatsof the social-ecological crisis, fear is part of a healthy response. But sotoo is creativity: alive to complexity and uncertainty, art and design canoffer “safe spaces” enabling people to test their assumptions, comparedifferent perspectives, and explore hopes and anxieties. By combiningthe power of creativity with the self-reflexive and emancipatory focusof criticality, people might envision alternative possibilities (Crossickand Kaszynska, 2016, p.63), and make discerning choices betweenthem. Here, then, is potential to develop the ideal of planetary health,bringing together ecological regeneration with restorative justice in aproject of cultural transformation.

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Nixon. R. (2013). Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Harvard University Press.

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13Social Design Institute, UAL socialdesigninstitute@arts.ac.uk

The Social Design Institute champions social and sustainabledesign at University of the Arts London. Its mission is to useresearch insights to inform how designers and organisationsdo designing, and how researchers understand design, to bringabout positive and equitable social and environmental changes.The Institute achieves its mission through original research,translating research through knowledge exchange and informingteaching and learning.

Published by www.arts.ac.uk University of the Arts London October 2020 272 High HolbornLondon WC1V 7EY De

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